


To The River

by schmevil



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Alternate Reality, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-15
Updated: 2009-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-02 21:30:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schmevil/pseuds/schmevil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As far back as he could remember, Snape had always wanted to be one of them. (Goodfellas inflected AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	To The River

**Author's Note:**

> Implied torture? Nothing graphic.
> 
> Outlawpoet betaed.

His bedroom window provides an excellent view of all the goings-on across the street. Every night after finishing the dishes he reads by the window. Electricity is strictly rationed and unavailable more often than not, so he makes it last by mostly using moonlight. That's what he tells his mother. She appreciates his frugality. More telly for her while he's at school.

As long as he can remember his lullabies have been a combination of his mother's stories of her own childhood, and the men. Every one of his mother's stories is shot through with bitterness. He begs her to repeat them, over and over until he knows them well enough to tell them himself, but he doesn't get tired of them. He couldn't. Fantastic and terrible, like she is sometimes, especially when she's angry. His father says he's too old for stories, and she's even echoed him. Too old for stories, but she tells them anyway, without pleasure or affection.

Better, are the sounds of the men. Yelling, laughing - celebrating, mourning or playing cards, it all sounds the same. Easy. He can lie there, waiting to fall asleep, and imagine himself one of them, telling stories while everybody listens.

His father hates it and there's nothing he can do about it. He hates that even more and takes it out on Severus and his mother. His father's always angry about something, though. Severus doesn't remember what it was like to care, because he stopped doing that a long time ago.

 

Not everyone sees how things really are, but Severus does. Early in their relationship, his father managed somehow to find a job in the city, and moved into his mother's tiny apartment in The Lawn, selling the house on Spinner's End. The Lawn was cheap, for the city, safer even than his home town and close to both their jobs - the obvious choice. It's safer because it's a mixed neighborhood, the buildings old and wreathed in older charms. Severus is strange, but neither too ordinary, or too extraordinary.

All his life, the charms have sung to him. When he involuntarily levitates things for six months in his sixth year, the bakery and alley behind the tobacconist's shop are places where it goes unremarked. At home, his parents fight and make up, fight and make up, and his mother sends him to his room, until he stops gluing things to the ceiling and walls when he's cold, cranky, or tired. He's never to talk about it, never to _show_ it. His mother cleans up his messes, and when she's tired of it, recruits him. Take this to the bin, Severus. Put away this jumper, Severus. Hide this vial, Severus, you know where. Hide, hide, hide.

There are pockets in The Lawn where Severus is almost normal, and he learns how to feel them out. He has a mental map: here, people do their errands in purple robes and conical hats, without being jeered at; here they wear blue jeans, work-stained shirts, and heavy boots, and all have the same haircut. It's safer because he isn't the only child with a secret, even if he's the only one meant to live in both worlds.

It's safer too, because the men keep it that way. They're another thing he's always seen clearly.

 

He meets a couple of them when he's ten. He's walking home from the butcher's with a tiny package of stewing beef, not paying much attention to anything except how empty his belly is, and how empty it's going to stay, when all of a sudden, this lanky kid, only three or four years older than him, knocks into him coming out of the pub.

"Oi," he says, not thinking. When the kid stops and looks at him, Severus' eyes go big. Show no fear, he thinks, but this isn't his father. This is new territory entirely.

"What d'ya mean 'oi'?" His sharp voice attracts the attention of three men, the old ones who always sit outside the pub smoking.

Severus just stares, dumb.

"Competition, eh Philly?" asks the one with white hair. Philly goes red and the others laugh.

"Balls on this one." The dark one pushes away from the wall to punch Severus' shoulder. He nearly falls, and scowls darkly when they laugh again.

"Hey, get off." The white haired man waves at Philly and he does. Severus takes it as a sign to go home. He's got dinner to start.

"Where you goin'?" calls out the quiet man, the one who hardly ever laughs.

He stops. "Me?" There's no one else close but he can't imagine why the quiet man would be talking to him.

"Yeh. Come sit." He beckons Severus forward, like there isn't the slightest possibility of his refusing. Like a king.

"I've got to start dinner," he says and wishes he hadn't.

The quiet man smiles. "What, you can't sit for a minute?" He waves for Severus to sit down beside him.

"No, the meat'll go bad."

The man stares at Severus, hard, but it's enough like what he gets from his mother that he doesn't worry, thinking the most he'll get now is a smack. "You've got lip."

He shrugs.

"Come back after you make dinner."

"I gotta do the dishes too."

"After them."

"Alright."

So he does. He sits at the quiet man's feet while they play cards and gets drinks. He comes back every night for the rest of the summer. There's always a place for Severus, when they're holding court.

 

In the fall they start sending him on errands and he has a real part time job, on top of his chores. His mother loves it because it keeps him busy and out of trouble. His father, who started working when he was young, loudly approves.

"Children're spoiled these days. Don't know how to work. Don't have any discipline." Severus hears this and at least ten other things about wicked, lazy do-nothing children every time he comes home from a job. He doesn't mind because he's making money, most of which goes into the house but he's in.

Even before he almost got knocked over in front of the pub he knew he wanted to be a part of them. It's with them he belongs. Somebody in a neighborhood of nobodies. And the other thing. The thing his father doesn't know, but his mother does. The thing that makes it easy to make it through whatever his father throws at him - magic.

It's not like his father doesn't know he married a witch. Eileen Prince would never let him forget exactly who she is, but only so he doesn't get too full of himself. Not to threaten him - magic was something she'd drag out in an argument but never actually use. It was between her and Severus, and now, the men. There is the baker, the tobacconist, the grizzled old wizard in purple robes, but none of them have much nice to say about Eileen Snape. Not since she'd married a Muggle - and this is a quiet word, one that Severus never speaks, not even when he his father is at work - but they see _him_, more and more, the closer he gets to _them_.

They aren't like anyone else. They do whatever they want. Better than being the Minister of Magic. He's the luckiest kid in the neighborhood. He can go anywhere. Do anything. He knows everybody and everybody knows him. They still don't like him. Strange child. Ugly child. He's always been able to hear what they say about him. Difference is, now he doesn't care.

("Back alley halfbreed," David says. David is exactly as smart as a grasshopper, so Severus knows that he didn't come up with that himself.

"Shut your mouth, whore's son." David does shut up, but he also raises his fists and comes at him. Lucky Severus is faster.

David goes down easily, and while Severus doesn't exactly tell him that the words back alley and halfbreed are off limits, in any kind of relation to him, but he gets the message.)

He doesn't have to watch the men from his bedroom window anymore, because when he's not working for his mother, he's working for them, but every night he reads by the window, and every night he falls asleep to the ruckus from across the street.

 

The Lawn borders the wide ring of the industry that keeps the city going. It's a poor neighborhood and too close the river to smell nicely, or ever be clean. It's full of raw people, who only hold their tongues when it's important.

On Sunday mornings his father reads the tabloids and watches the sun rise over the close-packed rows of buildings. One day he tells Severus that it's not all that different from the town he'd grown up in. When his grandmother dies, Severus gets chance to see if that's the truth, or if his father's endless, bitten off anecdotes are. Not stories, because he didn't talk much, if he wasn't yelling or scolding.

Spinner's End is a narrow street, by the river, in a narrow, ugly town. It's not that different from The Lawn, except in the details. A weekend of just him and his father, haunting places his dead family lived for generations.

The house is ragged looking, even more than the others on the street. It's the last one, and you'd expect something special for that fact. The windows are half plywood, half glass, and the glass is painted colours. His father frowns around his cigarette like its acid and ash. "Hippies," an old man says. One of the neighbors. "Sign o' the times I suppose." His father spits out his half smoked fag - rare show of waste - and drags Severus back to the dingy motel.

It's a cheap room. There's only one curtain, and it covers three quarters of the window. Severus spends the night being woken up by headlights. They share a bed. It's cheaper, his father says. If they crack the window open, it's too loud - from shift workers, whores, drunks - so Severus suffers through the heat, sweating beside his father.

His father earns a few thousand pounds off of his mother's death, and though he cries through the reading of the will, that satisfies him enough to get over the house. Enough that he doesn't spend the drive back to the city ranting. They take the river road. It's the same river that the city straddles, but it doesn't seem the same.

His father stops to buy cigarettes and Severus shadows him into the store, though his father can't ever afford to buy him anything. He stalks the aisles while his father chats with the clerk, like they're old friends. They might as well be, he thinks. And he's struck by the utter ordinariness of it: the town, the shop, the clerk and his father. It's not his place.

He sneaks out that night, to go to the pub, where he's welcomed. He gets the second best seat in the house, and everybody listens while he tells them about his trip.

"Grown up now, aren't you?" They say, and other things, fondly. They play cards and drink, around him. The cards try to run away, so it's a violent game, made worse by the fire whiskey. He gets jabbed in the ribs more times than he can count, but he doesn't mind.

 

He's eleven when he learns the most important lesson of his life.

Even with all the presents he didn't pawn, his things don't fill a trunk, but he's all packed a week before he's due to leave.

When his letter comes they have cake and puddings at the pub. They force a glass of whiskey on him, laughing when he coughs most of it back up. John �" the quiet man �" punches his shoulder and Severus almost falls down. It's great.   Philly laughs most of all and spends the night telling him about all the horrid shit they pull on firsties. Severus doubles up on studying after that. As much as they tease him about it, everyone agrees it's a good idea. Everyone likes seeing what he can do.

They're proud of him.

The day before he leaves, he goes for the groceries and runs errands as usual but when he gets back to the pub John nods at him.

"Come 'ere." He follows John and they start walking down the street. "How d'you think you'll sort?"

Severus scowls at the ground and stuffs his hands in his pockets. Usually John doesn't talk much. He wishes he'd be quiet now.

"What?" John prods him.

"My mom says I'll probably be Hufflepuff." She talked enough about Hogwarts that he knew she didn't say that out of motherly affection.

"Philly's a Hufflepuff." 

"Good for Philly."

"Yeah?" John grins. Severus scowls. He doesn't want to say anything.

They walk the next few blocks in comfortable silence. John nods at a crumbling townhouse and they head up the stairs. Severus has never been inside, but he's passed by it. Everyone knows not to go inside.

He follows John up the rickety stairs to the tiny top floor apartment. There's no door and the wallpaper is hanging in strips. The rug, what's left of it, smells like piss.

In the center of the room, a man in shiny blue robes sits awkwardly in a chair. He recognizes the two men standing by him, but Severus has never seen the man who slouches against the wall. He's got a fag in one hand and his wand in the other. His dust coloured hair falls in his face.

John greets them all warmly, especially the man in the chair.

Severus hugs the wall. As far as he's concerned, he's a coat rack. The smoking man doesn't notice him, or ignores him. Either's fine with Severus.

"Declan, how are you?"

"Not too good," says the sitting man. Severus remembers him now �" Declan runs a shop a few blocks away. Severus has never gone in - it's all artists, students and weirdos. He's come into the pub once or twice, to talk to William, John's brother. He hasn't been around in a while. He's never seen Declan in a robe before. Severus didn't know he was one of them.

"You gotta listen-"

Danny, the one on his right leans in. "You got something to say, now?" Declan flinches. "Didn't have much to say before."

"If you just listen- I already said-"

"Was listenin'," says Kerry. "You weren't sayin' nothin'." Kerry grins at him, wild. Declan shifts in his seat.

John and the other man, they just watch Declan squirm. John's patient.

Danny and Kerry start working. Severus has never actually seen them work before. They seem to enjoy themselves.

When Declan starts crying, John tells him to leave the room. He walks through the empty door frame to the stairs. There's a huge stain on the wall that he examines in minute detail, while behind him, muffled curses are drowned out by the noise Declan makes.

He can't help but try to guess what they are.

When it gets quiet, he doesn't try to listen as John, Declan and the smoking man talk. Instead he concentrates on Danny and Kerry, who're satisfied with a job well done. Their laughter makes it easy not to hear the other conversation. As curious as Severus is, he knows what to hear.

A few minutes later John comes out and nods at the stairs. Severus follows him back down and outside.

John lights up a fag and as they walk, smokes it down to the end and has to toss it away quick, cursing. He sucks on his fingers, and throws Severus a sheepish grin.

They stop outside a diner he's never really seen before, though he's passed by it. "Lunch?" John asks casually.

"Alright," he says. He doesn't know if there's another appropriate answer. Severus has only ever had his own cooking, and twice Roger's, down at the pub.

Inside, it's dark and smoky and quite a lot like the pub. They sit at a booth, one with a clear view of the windows and the door, and a tired girl offers them menus. John waves them off. "We'll have two steaks, rare."

"Whatever."

Severus gulps down a glass of cloudy water and surreptitiously watches the few people in the place. He plays with his napkin. Stops when John looks at him.

The steak is the best thing he's ever tasted and he gulps it down as quick as he did the water. He nearly chokes. John offers him his own water.

When they're done and John's smoking over a cup of nearly white tea, he looks out the window and says, "Nothing wrong with being Hufflepuff. Never betray your friends. You'll sort Slytherin. That's good too."

Severus nods. When John speaks, it always sounds true, even when it isn't. It's easy to believe him about this, though, because it's something he wants.

"I want you to write, regular-like."

"Really?"

John taps him on head, with the back of his teaspoon, almost too hard, but Severus doesn't mind.

"Sorry, sir."

"Keep your eyes open." Severus doesn't ask what he's supposed to be keeping his eyes open for - he's starting to get a sense of the kinds of things that John and the others need to know, and the rest of it, he'll figure it out. He'll have to. You don't disappoint John.

John leans back, and rests an arm across the back of his seat. He holds his fag loosely, and close enough to the old leather that if they were at home, Severus would be worried. They don't have leather at home; it's too nice. Severus is staring at the fag, but John taps him again. This time under his chin - he catches Severus' eye and holds it.

Severus wants to squirm, but it's John - you don't squirm. You just don't. A minute passes, at least, and then John nods, and pulls something out of his pocket. He puts it down on the table between them. His hand covers it completely.

"Take this with you to Hogwarts. Don't open it until you're there."

"Sure thing, John." Severus reaches out for it. John hangs on to it, just like he's still holding his attention, easily and completely.

"It's late. Your father will be wanting dinner." John shoos him off, with a wave of his hand, then turns his attention to the street outside the window.

Severus pockets the box, making sure no one sees it, and slides out of the booth. At the door to the pub, John calls out to him. "Don't forget to write, kid."

At home, Severus makes dinner with his usual efficiency. His parents fight, with their usual efficiency, and in under an hour, he's in his room, packing up the last of his things. The box goes into the false bottom that Philly helped him put in. Over it go clothes, and his paltry collection of books. No toys.

Write regularly. Keep his eyes open. And the box. Severus has a job.

He smiles.


End file.
